Forms of Devotion

by Diane Schoemperlen

  In fiction, as opposed to real life, what follows the crisis is called the resolution by which the loose ends of the story are tied up. In a serious novel do not tie up all these ends too neatly. The reader will find this hard to believe because in real life, after the crisis, things just tend to go on and on.

  The day will eventually come when your novel is finished. Years have passed. You have tinkered with the commas, deleted the word nice seventeen times, worked in all the words you love and then some, words like: permafrost, paradigm, abacus, sanguine, frugal, stark. You have rewritten, reworked, and revised as much as you can. You have read the whole book out loud to your cat. You know this novel is as good as it’s going to get. You know it’s time to stop. On the last page of the last draft, type the words THE END. By now these have become the words you love best.

  Sit back and admire your manuscript. Tap its many pages into a perfect pile and pat it lovingly. Rest your head upon it and grin. Put your manuscript in a sturdy box and send it to a prestigious publisher. Call all your friends. With any luck, they will take you out to celebrate. Eat shrimp and drink champagne.

  For a month or so, believe that you are brilliant. Sit back and admire yourself. Decide what you will wear to accept the Nobel Prize. Watch for the mailman every morning. Resist the urge to kill him when he brings back your novel in its now battered box. Send it out to another (perhaps slightly less prestigious) publisher in a new sturdier box.

  Remind yourself that you love writing more than anything else in the world. Read People magazine, National Geographic, and The Guinness Book of World Records. Do not read any other serious novels about love.

  Decide to repaint the bathroom. Study the paint chips for days. Make many trips to the hardware store. Admit that it is a relief to be working with your hands instead of your head. While standing on the ladder painting the ceiling, admit that in your novel about John and Mary you have barely scratched the surface of love. Realize that you know more about love now than you did when you started to tell the story of John and Mary. Some of this new knowledge you have learned from them.

  Realize that you have a lot more to say. Think about seismology and the power of love. Feel your veins filling up with words again. Think of all the words you love that you haven’t used yet. Words like: fugitive, iconoclast, wedlock, pendulum, labyrinth, pestilence, shark. Realize that you will have to write another novel. What else can you do?

  Begin with a man and a woman. Many famous novels begin with this familiar combination. Although it may at first strike you as rather trite, in fact, once you get going, you will find that it presents a vast array of possibilities.

  A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE

  The Maya believe that at the beginning of history, when the gods gave us birth, we humans could see beyond the horizon. We were newly established then, and the gods flung dust in our eyes so we would not be so powerful.

  —Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces

  The horizon is a state of mind, an optical illusion, that mythical place toward which we have all convinced ourselves we are traveling. But as we approach it, the horizon is always receding, and the vanishing point becomes the vortex into which we are all longing to be sucked.

  It is now common knowledge that the earth is a sphere rotating on its axis while revolving around the sun: yet it remains easier to believe that the world is flat and still. We take perspective for granted, as if we were born knowing that all receding parallel lines must converge at the horizon, as if the vanishing point were the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Everything that rises must converge.

  It all hinges upon geometry, the hierarchy of points and lines, angles and planes: vertical, horizontal, inclined, oblique, acute, obtuse. The farther away an object is, the smaller it appears. In this context, the word object means also the surface of the earth, the sea, the sky, and all living things. In this context, the word away also means ago. Objects and their reflections always have the same vanishing point. We have been told often enough that seeing is believing but the truth is we can never see things as they really are. It all depends on how you look at it.

  Faced with the principles of perspective, I am baffled by the endless task of trying to put things in it. I am plagued by vertigo. I am aging at the same rate as everyone else. I am afraid of becoming one of those people who is constantly asking, “What’s the world coming to?” As if they are no longer part of it. As if their hands are tied. The angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence.

  In an attempt to broaden my horizons, I once traveled alone to a tropical island where the air was warm as bath water, the humidity thick as fish. It bumped against my shoulders and nibbled at my thighs. At home my favorite fish is salmon. As the firm red flesh slides down my throat, I like to think of them struggling upstream to spawn: urgent, primordial, obsessed but not hysterical. Most fish never sleep. They remain always in motion, with their eyes open. But some fish have been known to sleep while leaning on rocks or standing on their tails. To determine the approximate age of a fish, examine the growth rings formed by its scales. Do this before you cook it. The same thing will work for trees but only after you cut them down.

  On my trip to the island I was traveling light. I wore the same pink sundress four days in a row. Every night I washed out my panties in the hotel bathroom sink. Every morning they were still damp but I wore them anyway. I wished Id brought a hat to protect my head from the sun which was closer there and so, naturally enough, larger, rounder, white. On the fifth day I bought a hat from a man in the hotel lobby but it was too late. I was already dizzy all day and at night the bed spun. That big ball hanging over my head had become a constant humming at the back of my mind. Even at midnight the color behind my eyelids was white.

  The man who sold me the hat said there had been a massacre on that very spot two hundred years before. He said thousands of natives had been killed but he did not say why or by whom. In these situations, one automatically assumes the aggressors were white. He said there were bones beneath the portico. In my dreams that night there were music and bones, one out of tune, the other out of context. The music was reedy, the bones were smooth and bleached, like driftwood.

  In all directions the horizon was simply the sea meeting the sky. At certain times of the day it was hard to tell where the sea ended and the sky began. At certain times of the day it no longer mattered. Perhaps this was the real reason why I had come to the island. At home the horizon is always obscured by big buildings, tall trees, by memories both good and bad. Even when I stand on my head, still I cannot see it.

  On the island in the distance there was often a sound like jet engines revving, an airplane landing or taking off, as if hundreds of people would be leaving or arriving any minute now.

  Over my shoulder, a clock was always ticking.

  Time has always been the monkey on our backs. Whether too much or too little, too fast or too slow, time is still a one-way street. We can only go forward, we can never go back, except in our minds which, like the weather, the government, and love, are unreliable and frequently exasperating. Time, like gravity, is irrefutable, a clear glass ball rolling down a silver slope. Memory is nothing more or less than the persistent attempt to push that ball back uphill.

  I imagine traveling to the home I remember from thirty years ago, only to discover that it isn’t there anymore. The spot where it stood is now an empty lot overgrown with dandelions, ragweed, and goldenrod. Someone has dumped an old green sofa and a television set with the screen smashed and its guts hanging out. I sit on the sofa and pretend I am watching The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday night with my parents. The neighbors I knew have either died or grown up and moved away as I did. All their houses are inhabited by strangers who eye me sideways with suspicion. The field where I played softball is now a parking lot. The corner store where I bought romance comics and blue Popsicles from an old lady with her hair in a net is now a fast food outlet. This sort of thing happens all the time. This is the nature of
progress.

  Everything is smaller, except the trees which are taller but fewer and diseased. The street I was not allowed to cross is now so narrow that when I stand in the middle of it, my outstretched arms nearly touch the parked cars on either side. This too is a matter of perspective. The past, like any other object, has shrunk with distance and the passage of time. This is the nature of nostalgia.

  Look back in wonder. Look back as far as the eye can see. All memories have their own vanishing points. I turn my back and walk away. At this point I discover that I have eyes in the back of my head.

  Of course I have changed too. I am older, taller, graying, and (supposedly, possibly) a little wiser too. Change is hard for most people. I am no exception. There are still some elementary illusions and expectations which I would gladly cling to if only time would let me.

  My own past seems now little more than a tricky act of ventriloquism. Most of the time the present strikes me as a breach of promise. I am not who I was led to believe I would become. And right now I know no more about the future than I ever did.

  There must be more to life than the future, more to each present moment than imagining the handsome men we will marry, the grand houses in which we will live, the shiny cars we will drive, the beautiful babies we will give birth to: painlessly, bloodlessly, perfect babies born with their eyes wide open and their dreams intact. We are all approaching the future just as the future is approaching us. We are on a collision course.

  Years pass. I try to be patient. I try not to get ahead of myself. A cosmic year is the length of time it takes for the sun to revolve around the Milky Way—approximately 225 million earth years. I wonder how long it will take the future to find me.

  My friend Delores had a baby two months ago, a girl, her first. Delores tells me that now she dreams about the baby every night, the baby grown small as a potato or big as a boat. Although she says this in a self-deprecating manner, Delores is very proud of herself and I go sour with envy. I tell her such dreams are probably commonplace among new mothers. She looks crestfallen. I feel guilty for having rained on her little parade of diapers, breasts, hormones, and maternal instincts. I feel guilty but too jealous to apologize.

  At night sometimes I think I can hear the baby crying faintly blocks away. The nights are warm, the windows are open. When I dream about Delores’s baby big as a boat, she is clutching a mysterious object in her right hand. When I look more closely, this object turns out to be, variously, an anchor, a roast beef sandwich, or a slippery bar of yellow soap. When I dream about Delores’s baby small as a potato, her eyes are sprouting white roots and her smile is inscrutable. There is a clock ticking again, a red one in the shape of an empty uterus.

  I wake with a fever and think about how babies will cry if you show them a drawing of a human face with three eyes and an upside-down mouth. Perhaps this explains my lifelong aversion to clowns. It is still dark, the bedroom is crowded with shapeless shadows. I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling: white paint, a few cracks in the plaster, four dead flies in the light shade. The night slips out the window. The sunrise is astonishing.

  The horizon is always at eye level, whether you are standing up or sitting down. I wonder where does the horizon go when there’s no one there to look at it? Still I cannot see the forest for the trees. Everybody needs something to believe in. When all is said and done, the quality of your life is determined by what and whom you have loved and how much.

  We have all been told many times that love is blind. But I have found that this is not strictly accurate. It seems to me that falling in love makes you see things that other people cannot see. Things like: honesty, integrity, wisdom, courage, a future in which you will finally be rich, famous, and happy, a future in which you will finally become the person you have always meant to be. Elevated to a fine clear altitude well above that where all other mere mortals plod on dully through their trivial lives, in love you become a visionary. Anything and everything becomes significant. You are blessed, at least temporarily, with perfect vision. You navigate fearlessly through both the visible and invisible worlds. You have never been more graceful or smart.

  When my friends met my latest lover, they were polite but quietly appalled. I could tell. Afterward they cried, “But what do you see in him?” I could calmly list a million things: the faded denim pulled tight across his groin, the angle of his neck as he leaned to kiss me, the sun on his hands as he held out to me a glass of wine, a plate of salmon, a bowl of nuts, a future in which I would finally get what I deserved.

  My friends shook their worried heads and asked, “Are you out of your mind?” I smiled coyly and said, “It all depends on how you look at it.” This lover’s face, it seemed, had always been in the back of my mind, his name on the tip of my tongue. I was through with waiting. I was finally ready to be happy. My friends warned me to be careful but I couldn’t see why I should be. They were all happy. Why shouldn’t I give it another try? As far as I could see, this new lover definitely had potential. As far as I could see, all my dreams were about to come true. I said, “There’s more to him than meets the eye.”

  Our lives, I imagined, were like parallel lines headed arm in arm, neck and neck, toward the horizon where they would ultimately converge and then we would vanish together into the land of happily-ever-after. This was after my trip to the island. The horizon at home being still obscured by structures, foliage, and memories, it was my recollection of that tropical blue meniscus of sea and sky that was my point of reference. I knew neither how to swim nor fly but I didn’t perceive this as a problem. I was so enlightened by love that I figured I could do anything. Every night I lay in bed beside him and counted his ribs, like the scales of a salmon, the rings of a tree. I was convinced that if only I loved him hard enough, I would achieve immortality. I was ready to put the horizon behind me. He slept on peacefully while I adored him.

  Eventually one of us did vanish but not as I had expected.

  This new lover proved to be yet another false alarm, another ordinary scoundrel like all the rest who had loved me and left me. Alas, another broken heart. No. The same heart, broken again. Still I was not willing to concede that love is blind. Rather, when my friends said (sympathetically), “We told you so,” I insisted that love makes you see things that aren’t there. Things like: honesty, integrity, wisdom, courage, the future, et cetera. Love is not blindness. Love is a hallucination, the ultimate distortion of reality by which all those parallel lines you’ve believed in for so long become curves and all perspective is lost. Love lets you loose in a part of the world where the atmosphere is too rare to sustain human life for long. Still you cannot see around the next corner and the horizon becomes a mirage.

  You can never see all sides of an object at once. Sometimes there is no time to figure out all the angles. Due to some bad experiences early in life, I am chronically unable to look a handsome man in the eye. I am a master of the sidelong glance. Historically speaking, his smooth skin was nothing but an aggravation of my rods and cones. I am well aware of the imperfections of peripheral vision.

  Logic, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. I try to draw conclusions the way I was taught to in school. Some valid arguments contain only true propositions:

  All tigers are mammals.

  All mammals have hearts.

  Therefore all tigers have hearts.

  Tyger! Tyger! burning bright/ In the forests of the night. Where is the forest? How long is the night?

  An argument containing false propositions may also be valid:

  All birds are mammals.

  All mammals have wings.

  Therefore all birds have wings.

  Ladybird, ladybird/ Fly away home,/ Your house is on fire/ And your children are gone. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Whose hand? Which bush?

  Some valid arguments have true conclusions and some don’t. Some true conclusions may be drawn from false propositions. The validity of an argument does not guarantee the truth of
either its conclusion or its propositions.

  To whom should I offer my argument?

  My friend Angela suspected that I was having a midlife crisis. She came over to rescue me. She made me a nice cup of tea and patted my hands, my back, my shoulders, my hair. Angela has always been religiously inclined. She said she had been looking into patron saints on my behalf because obviously I could sure use one right now. She figured that, all things considered, my best bet was either Gregory the Wonderworker or Saint Rita, both of whom could be handily invoked in desperate situations. Gregory, who was born in what is now Turkey around A.D. 213, was famous for his spectacular miracles which included changing the course of a river, moving a mountain, and turning himself into a tree. Rita had lived a very tragic life but after her death in 1457 she came up literally smelling like roses and is now invoked against infertility, loneliness, unhappy marriage, and tumors of all kinds. Rita’s fragrant body is still on display in a glass case at the Au-gustinian convent in Cascia, Italy, which, Angela suggested, might be the perfect destination for my next vacation since obviously the tropical island hadn’t done me much good.

  I listened but said nothing. I stared out the kitchen window. The sun would not stop shining no matter how hard I wished it would rain. My neighbor across the street had a pink plastic flamingo in his front flower bed. I asked Angela if she knew that flamingos are pink because of the shrimplike creatures they eat. Deprived of this food, their feathers will turn white. Angela said she did not know this. But she did know that Saint Gall was the patron saint of birds because he once performed an exorcism on a young girl and the demon flew out of her mouth in the form of a black bird. Lately all of our conversations have been like this one: ridiculous, maudlin, and utterly useless.